Old ex-con back at the Rock, telling prison stories

Carl Nolte

Published 10:30 pm, Saturday, November 9, 2013

Bill Baker strolls around Alcatraz. He spent four years there locked up and learned to counterfeit checks.
Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Bill Baker strolls around Alcatraz. He spent four years there...

Former prisoner Bill Baker, 80 years old, talks about his book in his former cell on Alcatraz in San Francisco, California on Thursday, November 7, 2013. He studied counterfeit check cashing on the rock and made it his life's work after leaving Alcatraz. Still on parole, he has written about his experiences at the prison in the book 'Alcatraz-1259'.

Bill Baker is a big man, with wary, hooded eyes that peer out behind thick glasses. He's an old man now; he talks softly and walks with a slight stoop. Occasionally his hands shake a bit. You wouldn't look at him twice if you passed him on the street. But he is a celebrity, a member of what he calls "an endangered species, very nearly extinct."

Baker is a former Alcatraz convict, and when he goes back to the Rock, visitors stop and talk to him, hanging on every word.

"I've met people from all over the world," he said. "The tourists love me. That's amazing, because I've been rejected all my life."

Baker said that last bit carefully, because he had a prison reputation as a tough guy. He's been a car thief, a jailhouse rioter, an escape artist.

He cut his own handcuffs off when he was being transferred from one federal prison to another. He hit a guard once, too. He was sent to Alcatraz, the ultimate federal prison, in 1957. He was 23.

Baker spent four years on Alcatraz and learned a trade from another inmate - writing counterfeit checks.

"Courtney Taylor taught me," Baker said. "He was one of the best in the business."

'I made good money'

Baker learned how to make fake payroll and corporate checks look real, learned bank routing numbers, and how to get around magnetic ink. He made a good living, he said.

"It was exciting. I liked it, and I made good money," he said. "The bad part was getting caught.

"I learned from my mistakes, but they learned from my mistakes, too."

He served several prison terms, nearly half his life was behind bars. "Age and technology put me out of business," he said.

Baker finally got out of Leavenworth in 2011, and now he's back at Alcatraz, at the age of 80, on a book tour, promoting his prison memoir "Alcatraz 1259." That was his number on the Rock.

He is a pretty good writer. He read a lot in prison. In Alcatraz, Zane Grey was his favorite writer. He took creative writing courses.

His story is plain, and as real as the sound of cell doors slamming shut, a sound like no other. "I've been a convict or an ex-convict all my life, doing a life sentence on the installment plan," he wrote.

Baker makes the old-time convicts look a bit like a band of brothers, mixed in with a few cold-blooded killers, career criminals, inmate politicians and "punks," who represent the sexual underside of an all-male prison.

There are also "snitches," informers spread throughout the inmate population.

"Whenever you have desperate men you have snitches," Baker said. "They would do anything to get out. You had to be very careful what you said to anybody."

A prison stroll

Baker is now free to walk around Alcatraz, now part of a national park, and he walked around the old prison one sunny morning last week.

He stopped by the ruins of the old warden's house and paused to talk at the main entrance, with its carved American eagle. He went into the mail cell block, past the control room, down the long corridor in the main cell block they called Broadway, up into the second level of the C block, and into his old cell.

Out the window, past the bars, the inmate in C block could see the Golden Gate Bridge and parts of San Francisco, rising on its hills, like an illusion.

Adjusting to routine

What was the worst part of Alcatraz? "Boredom," Baker said. That and the routine, the same thing all the time, a world run by someone else, guards who mark the routine with bells: a time to wake up, to count the prisoners, to go to meals, to go to work, to take a shower, to go to the prison yard, at lights out.

"Life is a contest," Baker said, "and if you surrender to the bells, you belong to the keeper."

Baker lives in Ohio, and is on parole. He's a featured author, a star on the Rock. He's selling his book on the island Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and at the Alcatraz shop on Pier 39 Saturdays and Sundays through November.

"Five days a week? Sounds like a job," someone said. Baker laughed. He's never had a job in his life.